Saturday, March 3, 2007

New Trident - we don't need this gold-plated comfort blanket

I am very grateful for Nick Harvey for kindly and thoroughly answering my and all the other questions in the recent on-line debate. It is very easy to get lost in the minutiae of the four boat/three boat/Iran/Korea debate. At the end of the day, this level of detail is not required. The fundamentals are very basic indeed.

It is worth remembering the scale of the USSR.

It stretched from East Germany to the border with China. It had fifteen constituent republics. At its zenith in 1985, it had 45,000 nuclear warheads stockpiled.

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had 5.3 million people in its armed forces.

That is the scale of the enemy we were facing when we commissioned Trident. Up against that, Iran and Korea are fly-droppings.

Now, we do not need a new Trident.

Some seem to see new Trident as a virility symbol. It would be more a sign of this nation's maturity for us to eschew new Trident and be peacemakers. It would restore some of this nation's good name after the Iraq debacle.

There are many other more pressing calls on this nation's purse, without foolishly investing in an expensive comfort blanket.